FOUR PHASES OF MORALS
TO
SIR HENRY HOLLAND, BART.,
M.D., D.C.L.,
PRESIDENT OF THE ROYAL INSTITUTION OP GREAT
BRITAIN, ETC. ETC.
Dear Sir,—As the substance of this book was originally delivered in the form of Lectures before the Royal Institution, London, I was naturally led, in giving my notes a more exact expression and a larger illustration, to do so in connexion with your name—a name which, besides its official significance in all that concerns the Albemarle Street Institution, was recommended to me by that remarkable combination of rare experience of life, enlightened scholarship, and various knowledge of men and places, which, more than the greatest metaphysical acuteness, or the most extensive academical learning, enables a man to be a sound judge of those important practical questions with which the science of Ethics is occupied. As by the arrangements of the season—1869—of which my course formed a part, the number of Lectures was limited to four, and as I determined to treat the subject in the concrete historically, rather than in the form of abstract discussion, it necessarily happened that the four phases of morals to which I specially directed attention, viewed in reference to the whole system of ethical doctrine, presented an incomplete and fragmentary aspect. I endeavoured however, under these limitations, to bring forward those historical manifestations of moral truth which both afforded a ready occasion for discussing some of the most fundamental questions of Ethics, and, from historical and local considerations, were most fitted to be presented to a British audience at the present day. At the same time, there runs through the four discourses a unity of thought and tendency beyond what the title indicates, and which those who are competent to judge will easily recognise. Hoping that you will find nothing in this book but what has been “attained with honesty, and maintained with moderation”—the test of excellence in such matters which yourself have wisely indicated,—and that you may be able to accord to these Discourses in their written form some portion of that approbation which your presence conferred on their oral delivery,
CONTENTS.
[SOCRATES]
[ARISTOTLE]
[CHRISTIANITY]
[UTILITARIANISM]
[FOOTNOTES]
SOCRATES.
As there is no country which can boast the honour of possessing more names of a world-wide significance than Greece, so among those who hold this lofty position there is no name superior to Socrates, concerning whom the Delphic oracle in ancient times, and a great utilitarian authority in modern times, agree in testifying that he was the wisest of the wise Greeks.[1.1] And though stout old Cato, in ancient times, as Plutarch informs us, gruffly enough expressed his opinion that the son of Sophroniscus was a pernicious old babbler, whose breath was justly stopped by the cup of hemlock which he drank for his last supper—in harmony with whom the benign old dogmatist whom the modern utilitarians revere as their patriarch declares that Socrates and Plato wasted their lives in talking nonsense under the pretence of teaching philosophy,[1.2]—yet these negative utterances, few and far between, against the fair fame of the father of moral science, have died away almost as quickly as uttered, and are now no more heard in the grand organ-swell of the general admiration of more than two thousand years. Unquestionably if there be any name, after the great Founder of the Christian faith, which is entitled to claim the title of a preacher of righteousness for all times and all places, it is the name of Socrates; and it is with the view of bringing his high merits in tins respect before the general public, in as easy a way as is consistent with scholarly accuracy, that I have undertaken to write the present paper.
The subject is one peculiarly attractive to a thinking man, not only on its own merits, but because of the ample and thoroughly trustworthy materials which we possess for forming a correct judgment. We are not here, as in the case of Pythagoras, sent to fish for fragments of truth among fanciful writers who lived several hundred years after the death of the object of their transcendental laudations; but, as in the gospel history, we have to deal with the intimate disciples and daily companions of the great hero of the story. We gather our knowledge of the life and philosophy of Socrates from Xenophon and Plato, both of whom have reported their intercourse with the philosopher in a tone of mingled admiration and sobriety which leaves no ground for suspicion. Only with regard to Plato we must take with us this caution, that he was both a poet by temperament and by mental habit a system-builder; and, as he chose to set forth his own speculations in a series of dramatic dialogues wherein Socrates is the chief speaker, we must beware of accepting, as standing on one common basis, the facts with regard to the life of Socrates brought forward in these compositions and the doctrines which are put into his mouth. With regard to the former, we may accept Plato’s evidence as a contemporary authority with the utmost confidence; with regard to the latter, we must be constantly on our guard; and indeed, according to my view, it is wise never to accept any statement of Socrates’s doctrine from Plato, of which the germ at least does not lie plainly in Xenophon. For Xenophon, just because he was a less original man than Plato, a pleasing and graceful writer, somewhat on the level of our Addison, was for that reason free from the temptation, or rather had not the capacity, to interpolate anything into his account of the philosopher which was not consistent with the actual fact. He was a plain man, with no theories to support, and no pretensions to maintain; and as a faithful contemporary recorder of what he heard and saw, a more capable and trustworthy witness could not be desired. We shall therefore draw our sketch of the life and sayings of the great Athenian preacher mainly from his pleasant little book, introducing the idealist of the Academy only where he cannot be suspected of using his revered master as a mere dramatic engine, or where his superior literary powers have enabled him to paint a more effective picture.
The age of Socrates was the age of Pericles, the culminating epoch of Athenian glory; he was contemporary with Euripides, Sophocles, Herodotus, Thucydides, Hippocrates, Democritus, Anaxagoras, Aristophanes, Phidias; but, while he shared all the elevating influences of this ascendant age, growing with its growth and blossoming with its blossom, he was not spared the sorrow of quitting the scene beneath the first dark shadows of its decay. That military ambition which is as much the besetting sin of democracy as of autocracy, had precipitated the Athenians, during the latter part of the fifth century before Christ, into a distant expedition which crippled their energies and exhausted their resources; all this, and certain violent revolutionary changes which arose out of it, Socrates had to live through, till at last, a few years before his death, he saw the pride of Periclean Athens laid prostrate at the feet of Lysander and the rude oligarchy of Lacedæmon. He was born in the year 469 B.C., eleven years after the naval battle of Salamis which freed Europe for ever from the apprehension of Asiatic servitude, exactly at the time when the brilliant but sober policy of Pericles commenced its long period of happy sway over the fortunes of the Athenian state. At this time Simonides and the other great poets who had seen and sung the glorious victories of Marathon and Salamis were swiftly departing from the scene; but the memory of those patriotic achievements still burned vigorously in every Athenian breast, and conspired, with the birth of new and ambitious intellectual aspirations, to surround the youth of the philosopher with an atmosphere the most favourable to social and intellectual progress. The importance which the achievements of the democracy at Marathon and Salamis gave to the middle and lower classes of society at Athens, broke down the barriers which ancient aristocratic exclusiveness might have raised against the pretensions of mere character without position; so that Socrates, though the son of a stone-cutter, and not, like Plato, drawing his blood from the old Attic aristocracy, seems to have found free entrance into the society of the most distinguished public and literary men of his age. His mother, as he himself took care to inform the world, was a “right worthy and worshipful μαῖα,” or lady-obstetrician; a “wise woman,” as the French say, in matters where it seems most natural that women should be specially wise; her name was Phænarete; but in social position, according to our aristocratic way of talking, she was nobody. What Socrates’s own profession was, or how he supported himself, a very important point in the history of all public men, we unfortunately do not know exactly; that he practised stone-cutting in his early years is not improbable; and this may have given rise to the belief mentioned by Pausanias, that a group of the Graces at the entrance of the Propylæa was his work; but there is not the slightest indication either in Xenophon or Plato that he continued to practise this art, or any other art, in after life. He had therefore no profession; and, as he made no money by his philosophy, we must believe that he had been left some small competence by his father, or some relation, on which he was content to live. That he was extremely poor we know, both from Xenophon and from his own account of himself before the jury at his trial. We know also that his habits of life were remarkably plain and frugal, that he required little money, and coveted none. That he was in a position to have made money if he had chosen there can be no doubt; but he expressly states that he had relinquished all projects for increasing his income, in order that he might devote himself without distraction to the great work of his life. However, with his philosophical notions about mere external grandeur, he seems to have been rich enough to live comfortably with a wife and family. This wife was the noted Xanthippe, not always the most pleasant companion, and, perhaps not altogether without reason, from her point of view, at variance with a husband who showed such utter indifference to worldly aggrandizement and domestic display; but for this touch of sharpness in the temper only, as he argued, the better fitted to be the wife of a philosopher, or to make a philosopher of her husband; for, as men who wish to learn to ride do not choose the meekest and most docile beast that they can find, but the most spirited, so the husband who wishes to rule a wife well should have such an one as it is not easy but difficult to control. This character of the philosopher’s wife rests on the authority of Xenophon; Plato nowhere alludes to it; and whatever her temper might have been, Socrates certainly did not consider it so bad as to justify his sons in withholding from her the usual love and reverence due from children to their parents; for “you may be sure,” he said, “if she is a little cross sometimes, it is for your good; and there is a reason in her objurgations which a wise son ought to acknowledge.”
Having no special occupation or profession in life, Socrates might perhaps have passed in Athens for an idle man, a lounger about the streets, and public talker, had there not sprung up about this time a class of men professing to be teachers of eloquence and of all wisdom, with whom he was brought into connexion. These were the Sophists, a name which means nothing more than professors or teachers of wisdom. Like these men, Socrates was always seen in the streets and public places of Athens, conversing with the clever young men, and publicly debating all points of speculative and practical interest. He was therefore in outward appearance and to the general eye a mere Sophist among Sophists. For it is not everybody who cares to know that two men who fight with the same weapons and in the same style of fence may be fighting for very different causes, on opposite sides, and with altogether contrary results. But the truth behind the appearance was, that while the majority of these Sophists taught eloquence as a trade, and logical training as an affair of intellectual exhibition, Socrates preached virtue as a mission, and the exercise of right reason as the only means of obtaining virtue. We say mission here not as a fashionable phrase of the day, but with a special emphasis; for it is quite certain, both from the speech of the philosopher at his trial, and from not a few passages in Xenophon, that he devoted his life to self-improvement in the first place, and to the improvement of his fellow-citizens in the second place, with the conscientious devotedness of a man who was strongly impressed with the conviction, that this employment was assigned to him direct from God, whose high injunction he was not at liberty to neglect. His language with regard to this is in a precisely similar tone to that of St. Paul when he writes, “Woe is me if I preach not the gospel.” The human source through which he got this mission some writers have been curious to trace, alleging that his master was Anaxagoras, and other things to that effect; but there is no hint of this either in Xenophon or Plato; and in fact it is foolish to go in search of a master for a man so thoroughly original, so distinct and decided a protester against all who had gone before him. We may be assured, at least, that in the moral philosophy which was the burden of all his teaching, he had no master but himself (as indeed Xenophon makes him say in express words) and the God to whom he habitually referred his highest inspirations; while in regard to other matters he had enjoyed the common training of all Athenians in music, poetry, gymnastics, and a little mathematics to boot—a science which, since the days of Thales (600 B.C.) and Pythagoras (550 B.C.), had occupied a conspicuous place in the higher culture of the Athenians. Of the exact date when he assumed a prominent position as a public teacher of wisdom and virtue we have no exact account; it is natural however to suppose, from the sobriety and solidity of his character, and from the long-continued quiet search after truth which occupied him in his early years, that he did not suddenly emerge into notoriety, but grew up step by step into that general acknowledgment of superior wisdom, on which, according to a well-accredited account, the Delphic oracle was not afraid to put its seal. Certain it is that in the year 423 B.C., when he was about forty-seven years of age, he was such a notable character in Athens as to have been brought upon the stage by the broad license of Attic comedy as the representative of the whole class of Sophists, with whom, by the superficial eye, he was naturally confounded. We must suppose therefore that his reputation as a great public talker and debater had been gradually growing, up to that period. And no doubt, even if he had been a man of less original talent, there was something about his personal appearance and character that could not fail to make him the mark of general observation among the busy-idle community of Athens. He was no less odd in his features and in his manner than in his doctrines; an ἄτοπος or eccentric person In the general opinion, whom no man knew exactly what to make of. His features, the very reverse of classical, are familiar to all the frequenters of our public museums; and are, besides, minutely described by both his illustrious disciples. His general appearance was that of a Silenus or Satyr, with a flat, somewhat turned-up, nose, full prominent eyes, big lips, and in later life, as appears from the monuments, a bald head; but these defects were of no avail, even with the beauty-loving Athenians, to diminish the charm of his conversation and the power of his address. For, as Alcibiades says in the Platonic dialogue, where he is one of the chief speakers, he was a Satyr only externally, but internally full of wonderful shapes and sights of gods, like certain hollow figures full of pipes and tubes, seen in the statuaries’ shops, which outwardly were shaped like Sileni, but within contained a machinery of beautiful sacred images. So, as is wont to happen to wise men, his loss became his gain, and his uncomely physiognomy, to all that entered into conversation with him, was the cause of an agreeable surprise. Very different in this from a great modern poet, who was sensitive about his club-foot, the Athenian philosopher made a jest of his unclassical nose, saying that if noses were to be valued as they ought to be, by their fitness for performing the proper functions of a nose, his olfactory organ was better than those noses whose shape was vulgarly accounted more classical; for the upward cast of his open nostrils made them more ready to receive smells from all quarters, while the comparative flatness of his nasal protuberance removed it from the possibility of interfering with the free vision of his eyes; and as to the prominency of these his organs of vision, this was a manifest excellence even more than the conformation of his nose, inasmuch as it enabled him to look, not only straight before him in the way that most eyes do, bat sideways also, and almost all round, so that he could see when no one suspected him of looking at them.